A creative federation of independent small states would not require secession

The good thing about small states, or ethnostates, is that they can have the stylistic and organic unity of a real, original culture---if they don't look elsewhere or to a big government for their models. Quentin Taylor writes about early Nietzsche's idea that culture is a unity of the expressions of a people, and how even much knowledge and learning is neither an essential means to culture nor a sign of it. A modern American would find the typical ancient Greek unknowledgeable.

When we have a wide variety of small states protected by a light federalism we can have the foundation for real evolution, with creativity coming from a variety of different sources. Cooperative competition would be important. Positive advances by one state could be borrowed in small doses so that the stylistic unity of the small state is not overwhelmed, as a preventive flu shot is absorbed without creating the flu. The United States would be such a federation if it would affirm small states, or reaffirm them, because it was this sort of federation originally conceived.

It's not federalism that is the “culture,” the federation protects the various real cultures of the states. This also confirms the traditional conservative dislike of big governments. Nietzsche thought that “Barbarism” is the juxtaposition of a confusion of different styles, which is what happens when big government overwhelms small states.

It is this sort of creative and stylistic independence of states that I think we should be concentrating on, rather than secession of states from the union.